1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to time and attendance systems for monitoring employee work hours at a medical facility, and more particularly to a computer system which monitors whether a patient is in the presence of a health-care worker at predefined times or locations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Health-care workers at a medical facility have historically used a time clock to record the time of day on an attendance card upon entering and exiting the workplace. Today computerized time and attendance systems have replaced the traditional time clocks. These systems read an unique employee number and other data from an identification badge when the employee arrives and departs the workplace. The acquired employee identification data are transmitted and recorded in a central computer along with the current date and time. That recorded information is subsequently used by a payroll program to calculate the amount of wages that each employee is to receive.
The employee identification badge also may be used to unlock doors to restricted areas of the medical facility, such as a pharmacy or psychiatric ward. This not only limits access to those areas, it also monitors which employees entered and when.
More recently, as described in the related patent application, another monitoring system for a medical facility has been developed which tracks the amounts of time that different health-care workers spend attending to each patient. That system locates an identification device near each patient, such as by embedding the device in a patient wrist band or in a chart held on the patient's bed. A data acquisition device is carried by health-care workers, such as physicians, nurses, physical therapists and the like, who directly provide care to the patients. When the health-care worker is in close proximity to a patient (e.g. within 10 feet), the worker's data acquisition device receives a signal from the identification device and measures an amount of time that the signal for that identified patient is received. This enables the data acquisition device to record which patients that health-care worker treats and the duration of each treatment.
A data interrogator occasionally reads the recorded data from each health-care worker's data acquisition device which identify the associated health-care worker, the patients that were treated, and the amount of treatment time. The data so read can be used to prepare reports for each patient specifying the amount of treatment received from each class of health-care worker, how frequently treatment was administered and other treatment related information. The patient reports are useful for billing and treatment monitoring purposes. The acquired data also can be used to generate reports about each health-care worker which provide information related to which patients were treated and the amount of time spent attending to patients. Knowing additional information about the acuity or ailment of each patient enables administrative personnel to determine the amount of treatment time various types of patients or ailments require from each class of health-care worker.